Stopping a few feet away and facing him squarely, I greeted him in Greek.

“Good evening,” he said, his eyes furtively landing on my face and then whipping back to products he couldn’t possibly want to buy. I continued to stare at him and he said, “I don’t work here, if you have a question.”

“Oh, I have a question, all right. You see, I’m sort of new in town and could use a little help finding someone you might know.”

He stopped pretending to shop and turned to face me. “Do I know you?”

“No, but I’m sure you know the gentleman for whom I’m looking. He’s a vampire who sometimes goes by the name of Theophilus.”

I expected the expression of shock—widened eyes, a droop at the corners of the mouth. The attempt to charm me was also expected. His mouth pressed into a thin line of determination and his eyes narrowed. I grinned at him, protected by my cold iron aura.

“You can’t charm me, sorry. But would you be so kind as to direct me to Theophilus? We need to talk, he and I.”

This was the bit where I expected him to sling a question at me. “Who are you?” was my best bet, but “Why do you want to talk to Theophilus?” would have been reasonable, or even “Did you say something about a vampire a second ago?” What I got instead was an all-out attack, complete with kitty hissing and an attempt to tear out my throat.

Since I’d been braced for it and was already juiced up, I didn’t go down to the ground, but I did back up quite a bit, until I had his arms locked in mine.

I had added a new charm to my necklace in response to my last encounter with a vampire, when I quite nearly died because I couldn’t finish speaking the unbinding. Until now I hadn’t had an opportunity to test it. A mental command would trigger a proxy unbinding of a target vampire. I’d figured that, like all my charms, it would take years to perfect. I triggered it now and was surprised to see the vampire flinch and become afflicted with existential horror—like the moment when you’re sitting in the hot tub with friends, some of whom are amazingly sexy, and a squirming sensation in your bowels means your diarrhea has come back. It wasn’t success, but it was better than nothing. I began to speak the unbinding aloud.

This lad wasn’t as strong as Zdenik, the vampire who’d nearly snuffed me. Zdenik had been nearly as old as I was, and my magic had drained rapidly trying to hold him off. This vampire was probably only a few hundred years old, and I could tell he was beginning to think it would have been far safer to simply talk to me. He abruptly changed tactics and decided to disengage. I held on to him, my fingers digging firmly into his arms. I couldn’t let him get away to prey on humans for a thousand years. He tried to use my strength against me, lunging back in for another attack since I was pulling on his arms, and I did release one arm to block access to my throat. Almost finished. He sank his fangs into the meat of my forearm, thinking perhaps he would simply drain me the slow way, but that was fine—it would be far too slow to do him any good. I stepped back, allowing him to think he had an advantage, and his free arm clutched at me to keep me from escaping. He was hooked now, but I paid a price when I finished the unbinding.

Some vampires sort of melt when they’re unbound and they simply splash on the floor. This guy exploded, showering my immediate vicinity and me in blood and gore. I looked fairly guilty, in other words, of a particularly heinous murder.

“Eww,” Granuaile commented from her vantage point. She was untouched by a single drop of blood. “I ducked,” she explained.

The lone store employee began to curse steadily and hysterically in Greek, his eyes the size of Ping-Pong balls. He had a cell phone out and was shouting into it as he ran from the store, escaping what he clearly thought was certain death.

“We have a problem,” I said.

“Ya think?”

“That didn’t go the way I thought it would.”

“I should hope not, because that would be pretty sick. You’re completely covered in viscera.”

I turned off my speed and strength bindings and said, “I’m camouflaging us. Help me find the surveillance systems. We need to destroy all record of what happened.”

“Right. Except for that pool of goo on the floor.”

“Yes. They can make of that what they will. I just don’t want them to watch the video and conclude I did something magical—or conclude he was a vampire.”

“Okay. We have all we need, right?” She held up a small basket full of the supplies we’d come for.

“Yep.” I cast camouflage on her, and as she faded from view she said she would check the back of the store.

“I’ll check behind the register,” I said, casting camouflage on myself. That drained my bear charm down to dangerous levels. I wouldn’t be able to maintain this for long.

I found a few monitors behind the register, but they were using a feed generated somewhere else.

“Back here, sensei!” Granuaile called. I followed the sound of her voice to the rear of the store, where there was a sign marked EMPLOYEES ONLY in Greek and English on a locked door. I bound the tumblers into the unlocked position and opened it. Inside were even more monitors and a black console with a tangle of cables snaking in and out of it.

“That’s our baby. Looks like a disc system similar to the one I had at Third Eye way back when.”

Granuaile pressed a few buttons and got several discs to eject. Searching her shopping basket with my fingers, I took out a pair of wire clippers and cut through all the cables in the back of the console. The monitors turned to snow as I did so.

“We’d better be sure this has no hard-drive backup,” I said. “We should smoosh it.”

“Aw, yeah, rage against the machine! Let’s do this!” I heard Granuaile shuffle backward and pictured her brandishing her staff. I threw the console down hard, rattling the case, but once the iron tip of Granuaile’s staff descended upon it, there was a significant dent.

“Again,” I suggested.

The console acquired two more dents in quick succession.

“Hold off,” I said. “Let me jump on it a few times.”

“Go.”

I did a gleeful mosh—or was it a skank?—upon the top, which did little to it but did manage to make me feel better.

“It’s bolted together fairly well. Let’s just take it with us and dump it into the pond in the park.”

“Good idea,” Granuaile agreed. Sirens could be heard approaching. “I think we should exit quickly.”

“Yes, let’s.”

Using the last dregs of my magic, I camouflaged the security console and the discs Granuaile had removed from it, and then I carried the console out of the store under my arm while Granuaile carried the discs out in her handbasket. The police screeched to a halt in the street and leapt out of their vehicles, square bodies emphasized by swaths of body armor and contrasted with cylindrical weapons of one kind or another. They utterly failed to see us as they surrounded the store; we slipped between them and jogged to Enikkea Park. There I called to Oberon, who found me easily by following the smell of blood. He’d been all alone for some time, since the dog walkers had all gone home once the sun went down. He’d entertained himself by sniffing around and chasing wee critters. I dissolved all camouflage and tossed the console into a square pond with a fountain in the middle of it. Granuaile snapped all the discs in half and threw them in as well.

“Did I miss something there?” Granuaile said. “You asked him about a vampire named Theophilus and he attacked?”

“Yep, you heard it all.”

“Who’s Theophilus?”

“Leif told me about him before we raided Asgard. He’s supposedly the oldest vampire living. Unliving. Whatever.”

“Do you think that was him?”

“No, not a chance. Theophilus would have been able to overpower me.”

“Then why are you looking for him?”

“I want to ask him if he knows anything about the old Roman pogrom against Druids. If he didn’t have anything to do with it directly, he surely knew who did. Leif thought that Theophilus spent part of every year in Greece; naturally every other vampire in Greece would be well aware of his territory.”

“So you never intended to kill that vampire?”

“Oh, no, I intended to kill him. Just not so publicly, and only after I’d gotten something useful out of him.”

“I’d say you got something useful. He wouldn’t have attacked unless he had something to protect. Theophilus is alive and around here somewhere.”

I nodded. “Good thinking. But it’s an unfortunate development all around; he’s going to know there’s a Druid nearby, because only Druids can do that to vampires. Are you sure you didn’t get tagged by any of the blood?”

“I’m not sure about my back, but I didn’t feel anything,” she said. She turned around and looked over her shoulder at me. “Can you see any?”

She appeared clean. “Nope. That’s excellent, because we still need a carrier for the tattoo ink. I have the ink itself ready to go, but I need you to sally forth and get a couple bottles of ethyl alcohol. Failing that, some strong vodka.” I gave her a wad of euros. “Oberon and I will wait here. Perhaps I’ll take a quick dunk to get the worst of the blood off.”

“Be back as soon as I can, sensei,” she said, and then jogged toward town.

I waded into the pool and began to splash my face and arms. There was no one around to object to a quick bath, so I didn’t try to be subtle about it.

"This is weird. I feel like I should be telling you a story right now," Oberon said. Usually I told him stories while he bathed.

Well, why don’t you? It’s about time you told me a story.

"Where am I supposed to get my stories? I’m the only hound who knows language well enough to tell them."

I think you just answered your own question. You have to make them up.

"Fine. There once was a Doberman named JeanClaude Van Hamme—"

Wait, nobody would name their dog that!

"Whose story is this?"

Yours, I conceded.

"Thank you. Because of your rude interruption, I will never tell you about the exciting adventures of JeanClaude Van Hamme, but I will tell you a different story, one that I have been working on for a while, if you promise not to interrupt. Do you promise?

I promise. I’m sorry for interrupting.

"Very well. Brace yourself for a tragedy. It has lost bones, lost balls, a profound waste of sausage, and everything."

I can’t wait! And I wasn’t kidding. If I had a tail to wag, I would have wagged it.

"Here it is, then … "

Oberon’s story, a mystery after the style of Sherlock Holmes, was called “The Purloined Poodle.” It featured a canine sleuth named Ishmael (a Weimaraner) and his trusty assistant, Starbuck (a Boston terrier), who foiled a nefarious plot set in motion by Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago.

Oh, Oberon, that was a wonderful mystery! I said when he finished. Bravo!

"I think it should be Sir Oberon. Arthur Conan Doyle got a knighthood for stories like that, so I think I should get one too."

I doubt the queen will knight you. She’s a bit stuffy about that sort of thing. But I can make you a Druidic knight if you wish.

"You can?"

Sure!

"Gravy! Sir Oberon the … um, I need a majestic adjective here."

Sir Oberon the Scruffy!

"I think not. I said majestic, as in noble, awesome, godlike, et cetera."

Sir Oberon the Modest!

Refreshed and feeling far less icky, I waded out of the fountain and checked to see how well I’d done. My cotton shirt was a lost cause; I’d need an industrial-strength cleanser to salvage it, and it wasn’t worth the trouble. I stripped it off and threw it on the grass, where I unbound the entire thing and let its component molecules mingle with the landscape. There would be no evidence for a forensic pathologist to find.

Granuaile returned shortly thereafter with two bottles of ethyl alcohol in her pack.

“We can get a hotel room if you want, but it’s probably best to get out of town. Feel like hiking back with night vision?”

She did. “I want to get started as soon as possible,” Granuaile said. “Ever since Laksha told me what you really were, I’ve wanted this. Let’s go.”

Chapter 8

Some moments are pregnant with epiphany.

The moment just before you take your first successful bike ride. That bit where the lights go out at your very first concert and people scream because other people who play rock and roll are walking onstage. The doubtful glare at a shiny can seconds before you chug it, choke on it, and realize that you’re a beer snob after all. That moment, sometime after the honeymoon is over, when it dawns on you that the honeymoon really is over and marriage will require a bit of work. And then that moment before your first child is born. They are the moments during which we are briefly, acutely, conscious that our lives will be changed forever … in the next moment.

Granuaile was having one of those moments. Her muscles were tense and she was holding her breath, because I held her right heel cupped in my left hand and pointed a sharp thorn at the sole of her foot with my other hand. Said thorn was hardened and sharpened and still attached to a living thornbush, which was of course in contact with the earth and thus with Gaia. The ink was ground lapis lazuli, mined in Colorado, mixed with alcohol.

Both of us were in a trancelike fugue, though only I was in contact with Gaia; Granuaile was being helped by Olympia, via the marble clutched tightly in her hand. We would pause occasionally to eat and sleep and keep our bodies functioning, but, once established, the connection with Gaia would have to stay open for three months. We’d be extremely vulnerable and less-than-sterling conversationalists.